Pozieres - so much worse than Gallipoli

When official war correspondent Charles Bean described one location of the Battle of Pozieres as "more densely sown with Australian sacrifice than any other place on earth" he was writing quite literally.

Pozieres actually started well, with the diggers achieving a significant breakthrough, the standout success of that part of the Somme battlefield at that time.

But over the next seven weeks, German artillery blasted Australian positions.

Soldiers were maimed and blown to bits. Others were buried alive in collapsing trenches, their mates frantically digging as more shells landed. Many survivors emerged with nerves shattered from the incessant pounding.

In just three days, the Australian 1st Division suffered 5285 casualties. It was withdrawn and replaced by the 2nd Division which experienced 6848 casualties until it too was withdrawn and replaced by the 4th Division.

With 2000 dead from the Battle of Fromelles, the Australian Imperial Force had suffered as many dead, wounded, missing and prisoners in eight weeks on the Western Front as it had in eight months on Gallipoli.

Pozieres started on July 23, 1916 - 100 years ago on Saturday - and ran to September 3 and was Australia's contribution to the Battle of the Somme, launched on July 1 and not officially called off until November 18.

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By that time more than 1.2 million had been killed and wounded in the biggest battle of the Western Front of WWI.

Australia's Western Front baptism of fire came at Fromelles on July 19, a disastrous venture which resulted in more than 5500 casualties, including almost 2000 dead, for no gain whatsoever.

Eighty kilometres south and four days later, the 1st Division attacked towards the village of Pozieres, a well-defended German position on higher ground.

With more careful planning and better tactics than were evident at Fromelles, this was completely successful and the ruined village was in Australian hands by daybreak on July 23.

But this standout success ensured the Germans, under orders to immediately retake lost territory, would respond vigorously.

"Pozieres was a valuable point that had been well defended. The Australians captured it and then the Germans turned their artillery on them relentlessly," said Australian War Memorial senior historian Ashley Ekins.

Not before or since have Australian troops faced such a sustained, brutal, pounding bombardment which continued for three days, inflicting far more casualties than were sustained in the initial attack.

That continued on and off for the duration of this battle.

Bean wrote that the shelling of Pozieres "did not merely probe character and nerve, it laid them stark naked as no other experience of the AIF ever did".

Ekins said men went crazy, others sought to escape but mostly they stuck to it and kept fighting.

"They rotated three division through what Bean called this `ghastly mincing machine', the 1st Division, followed by the 2nd and 4th. Each of them rotated through this sheer hell twice," he said.

Mouquet Farm, about 1.7km from Pozieres, is classed as a separate battle, perhaps only because it was a new objective.

The diggers referred to it as "mucky farm" or "moo cow farm" and in nine separate attacks by the three Australian divisions between August 8 and September 3, it remained in German hands. The exhausted Australian corps withdrew from the line and Mouquet Farm finally fell to British forces three weeks later.

Australia's last contribution to the Battle of the Somme came in November, when the rested Anzac Corps launched two unsuccessful attacks on the village of Gueudecourt on the northern end of the Somme battlefield on November 5 and 17 - 2000 more casualties for nil gain.

By this time northern Europe was well into winter and ground churned by shellfire had become an impassable quagmire. Conditions were truly atrocious, as exhausted soldiers dragged themselves through the clinging freezing mud.

British commander-in-chief General Douglas Haig finally conceded enough was enough - the offensives would resume in 1917. Almost five months of relentless attacks had pushed the Germans back about 12km at the furthest point.

The fighting might have eased but the winter of 1916-17 was to be the most bitter for decades and troops in the sodden trenches existed in utter misery.

For Australia, there were far-reaching repercussions from all this blood-letting.

"The Australians had a degree of naivete and perhaps arrogance about themselves after Gallipoli. They believed they knew soldiering and they could do this stuff. The Western Front came as a terrific shock," Ekins said.

In those few weeks, they realised they were facing a formidable enemy, well-trained, disciplined and armed with excellent weapons.

"It was a war they had to master. They had to learn in a very hard school," he said.

Pozieres had other consequences.

Appalling casualties and the looming realisation that victory was not in sight convinced the Australian government the only way to make up troop numbers was by conscription.

Inspired by Gallipoli, 165,912 men flocked to the recruiting offices through 1915. From then on it was all downhill, with 124,352 enlistments in 1916, 45,101 in 1917 and 28,883 in 1918.

So the government embarked on the first of two conscription referenda, the most bitter, rancorous, divisive political campaigns in Australian history. Both were defeated.

In 1935, Bean, who witnessed almost every Australian battle of the Western Front, convinced the new war memorial to buy a site of the Pozieres battlefield known as the windmill.

It was this very site he referred to as more "densely sown with Australian sacrifice".

The main Pozieres memorial isn't far away, but it was from the windmill site that a handful of earth was removed in 1993.

On Remembrance Day that year, one of Australia's few remaining WWI veterans Robert Comb sprinkled it on the coffin of the unknown soldier at the Australian War Memorial, declaring: "Now you're home mate."